“People will tell you where they’ve gone / They’ll tell you where to go / But till you get there yourself, you never really know,” Joni Mitchell sings in 1976’s “Amelia”—words that Cristin Milioti found herself sobbing to at the 80-year-old’s triumphant recent Hollywood Bowl concert.
“I feel like I’m still recovering, because I cried for the entire three hours,” she tells Vanity Fair from her New York apartment. “‘Amelia’ is my favorite, and I couldn’t believe she sang it—I completely fell to pieces.”
Milioti wasn’t alone in her rapture. “Everywhere you looked, there was someone crying. Then you would catch each other’s eyes, touch your heart, and give each other a nod. It feels like witnessing a miracle—someone who changed music and has certainly whispered in my ear throughout my entire life helped me understand myself and the world. It felt very holy.”
While at the star-studded concert, Milioti received some admiration of her own. “I had a lot of really lovely interactions at that show from people who really are loving The Penguin,” the actor says of her lauded performance in the HBO series as Sofia Falcone, a mobster princess turned murderous villain facing off against an unrecognizable Colin Farrell as Oz Cobb. “I feel very protective of her,” Milioti says of Sofia, who after being tortured for more than a decade in an Arkham prison for a crime she didn’t commit, kills the family members who lied to keep her confined. Homicide aside, “I am just in love with her.”
Bringing the role to life has been a dream assignment for the 39-year-old actor, who long before she ever auditioned for a comic-book film, dressed as Catwoman for Halloween. The idea of Sofias running around this year makes Milioti’s face light up. “I get emotional just talking about it. I would be so blown away,” she says. “That would be a lot to take in, but I would gladly take it in.”
Just as Joni sings of a winding journey in “Amelia,” Milioti has been charting her own path since dropping out of New York University after a single year. She launched herself into a Tony nomination for 2012’s Once, the Broadway musical based on the Oscar-winning Irish film. That star-making turn led to roles big (the titular mother in How I Met Your Mother) and small (30 Rock’s “Very Sexy Baby”), but always memorable. Juicy parts alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, Andy Samberg in Palm Springs, and Jesse Plemons in an episode of Black Mirror followed. It’s all led to the most high-profile project of Milioti’s career—no false alarms in sight.